I was just trolling through the archives on my site and after reading a couple of my longer form posts, it inspired me to throw up another one. Here comes some rambling – get excited…
The Oatmeal is about as good a site as you’ll ever find run by one person. This video profile of the site’s creator explains how it came to be and how he makes the magic happen.
About six months ago, I was telling people that I thought that blogging platform Tumblr was about to explode in popularity and could very well become the next Twitter-sized phenomenon. Well, today I saw this article that explains the following:
For the first time, Tumblr is now a top 50 site in the U.S. in terms of traffic as gauged by Quantcast. And only half of Tumblr’s 6.25 million users are in the U.S. Those users are now posting some 4.5 million posts a day — that’s up from 650,000 new posts a day a year ago.
Perhaps most impressive of all the numbers though is that Tumblr is now growing by 300 million pageviews per month. That means that their growth is larger than the entire network was a year ago. And if that data holds, they’ll surpass 2 billion pageviews sometime in September. They’re also growing by 25,000 new users a day, so they should hit 7 million users next month.
And this comes on the heels of another article I read a couple days ago about how big media is now embracing Tumblr. Needless to say, I’m even more convinced that Tumblr’s on its way to being huge than I was six months ago.
The video above is the newest trailer for The Social Network (aka, The Facebook movie). The marketing campaign so far for this movie has been amazing, and I’m way more excited to see it than I ever expected to be.
Has the Internet ruined the art of writing headlines? This article makes a pretty compelling case:
Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.
Early this year, the print edition of The Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: “Better never than late.” Online, it was changed to “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno.”
Well, I’m pretty sure that the recent Old Spice campaign is the most impressive/successful social media campaign ever attempted to date. Here’s a great look at how they pulled it off. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now.
I saw Inception a couple days ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Just an amazing, mindbending, thought-provoking movie from a filmmaker (Chris Nolan) who might just be the most creative guy making movies these days.
But as blown away as I was by the movie, it was taken to a whole other level when I read this theory about what’s actually going on in the film.
This post has been a little on the serious side, so I’ll leave you with something a little lighter. It’s a video of a live Eminem performance but that’s not why you should watch it. You should watch it because of the kid you’ll see in the crowd at the 1:15 mark.
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